AI trainer salary: how much do AI trainers make?

The short answer

Across the 952 AI training roles open on Tier1 right now, 742 publish an hourly rate. The median is $70 an hour, half of them pay between $50 and $100, and the best paid role offers $400 an hour. 562 roles pay $50 an hour or more, and 187 pay $100 or more.

Those numbers are for expert work: the roles listed here hire people for a profession, a degree or a language. General data labelling, where no background is asked for, pays far less and is not what this guide describes.

AI trainer salary per hour, per month and per year

AI trainers are almost always paid by the hour or by the task as contractors, so there is no salary in the usual sense. What a role comes to over a month depends on the hours it offers and how steadily the project keeps you busy. At the median rate of $70 an hour, this is what different weeks come to before tax:

Those are ceilings, not forecasts: hours rise and fall with a lab's needs, and few projects keep anyone at full time for a whole year. Of the roles that state their hours, the median cap is 40 hours a week. At the top of the range, 187 open roles pay $100 an hour or more. Those ask for a licence, a doctorate or years in practice: the field you work in moves your pay more than any other factor.

What moves the rate: your field

The biggest single factor is what you know. Fields where a wrong answer from a model is expensive, and the people who can catch it are scarce, pay the most. Right now the best paid fields by median are law ($110), medicine ($110), finance ($100). At the other end are AI & data ($50) and language & audio ($48).

The middle half is the range between the lowest and highest quarter of rates in a field, which is what most of its roles actually pay. Every field is on its own page, with its roles listed underneath.

What moves the rate: your languages

Roles that need a language other than English are often priced by how hard it is to find people who speak it well, not by how widely it is spoken. A role that needs a language and a profession together, say a doctor who writes Japanese, usually pays like the profession.

The full list is on the languages page.

Hourly, per task and everything else

Of the 952 open roles, 742 pay by the hour (78%), 12 pay per task or per item, 42 state a monthly, yearly or one-off amount, and 156 publish no rate at all.

An hourly rate is the easiest to compare, but it is only as good as the hours on offer. Per-task pay depends on how fast you work: before you take a per-task role, time yourself on the first few tasks and work out what it comes to per hour. A rate that sounds low per task can beat an hourly one for someone fast and careful, and the reverse is just as common.

How many hours are there?

416 roles state how many hours a week they offer. The median is 40 hours a week at most, and 158 of them cap the work at 20 hours or fewer. Most of this work is designed to sit alongside a full-time job, and projects scale up and down as a lab's needs change. Treat it as well paid part-time work, not a salary.

What you actually take home

The rates here are what the role pays you, before tax, in US dollars as published. You are paid by the platform running the project, usually as an independent contractor, which usually means nobody withholds tax for you. Set aside tax on what you earn, and check how the platform pays out to your country before you start.

How these numbers are made

Every figure on this page is calculated from the roles open on Tier1 at the time shown at the top, the same way as the pay index: each role counts once, at the middle of the hourly range it publishes, so a role paying $40 to $60 counts as $50. Roles with no hourly rate are counted as open roles but left out of every rate.

If you only want the best paid work, the high paying roles page lists every role at $80 an hour or more. If you are not sure the work is for you, start with what AI training work is.